Why Should I Believe The Bible? Series

Why Should I Believe the Bible?

How do we determine the reliability of things?

Scrutinize the Sources of the Bible

Are the Manuscripts Reliable?

Test the Truthfulness of the Bible

Are the Apostles Reliable?

Is the History Accurate?

Can the Prophecies be checked?

Examine the Effects of the Bible

Are lives being changed?

Slide

This has been a great week.

I got a couple of very exciting emails this week.

I don’t think we are going to have any worries that this financial recession is going to affect us.

Christian Widow in Nigeria email

One email I got was from a Christian widow in Nigeria whose husband was a Dr. and worked for an embassy. She said in her email that she wants to give several million dollars to a Christian cause because she is dying and childless and out of nowhere, I get her email. She heard of us from an unnamed acquaintance. I want to tell you the name of Hickory Creek is really getting around.

I am trying to get a hold of the lawyer she told me to contact and it may cost us a few thousand dollars upfront, but that will be more than made up when we get the millions of dollars she wants to give us.

Microsoft Email

Not only that, but I received another email about Microsoft doing some email testing and they are going to send me a check for every person that I forward an email on to as well as money for every person that my friend forwards it on to.

Is this awesome are what?

I am waiting on the checks now.

From the looks on your faces, I would say some of you don’t believe me.

I bet there are some of you saying,

“Scott, you can’t believe everything you read! Those things are Urban legends, Myths, hoaxes. They aren’t true. There are no dying widows looking to give you millions and you aren’t going to be getting any money from Bill Gates. Don’t believe everything you read!”

I know you are right.

But if we can’t believe everything we read, how do we make a determination about what we should believe?

How do we know what we should believe or not?

Now, this may not seem too important in regard to scam emails that have no bearing on our lives anyway, but

should we believe the warning labels on medicine?

safety precautions when dealing with electricity?

Should we believe warnings we hear during inclement weather?

I am sure all of you would say we need to trust those things, because they can have great bearing on our lives, so it is important that we

learn to judge truth from falsehood and

know the difference between things that matter and things that don’t.

Now, in the case of hoax emails, we can judge the truthfulness by a quick search on the internet of hoaxes or by checking with the source of where the hoax is coming from.

I could call Microsoft and ask them if this is true. They would say no and that would be the end of the story.

But what about things that are harder to check directly?

How do we determine the reliability of what we read or hear in those cases?

Today we are going to look into that in regards to the Bible and ask the question

Why Should I Believe the Bible?

Slide

This is not so much a message from the Bible as it is about the Bible.

It is extremely important for people to understand and know why they believe the Bible.

This is because the Bible is our source of

most of what we know about Jesus Christ,

all of what we know concerning the Salvation it speaks of and how to attain it, and

all of what we know concerning how we should live our lives to glorify God.

This book, if true, is one that will affect every aspect of our life now as well as our life eternal.

So, what support is there that this is really the word of God and that we should believe the Bible?

To answer that Question, we are going to begin looking at some of the evidence to make a determination as to if it is trustworthy or not which will help us to decide why we should believe the Bible.

In checking out this evidence, we first want to

Scrutinize the Sources of the Bible

Slide

Whenever we investigate the believability of something, we want to check into the sources.

First we want to know what the Bible claims about itself?

In the Bible we find that it tells us the Scripture is the inspired word of God.

Slide

2 Timothy 3:16 - All Scripture is God-breathed…